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Below are the 3 most recent journal entries recorded in the "_Mark_" journal:

September 9th, 2008
10:28 pm [Link]	Upgrades Experience with the little packraft last year convinced me I wanted something that was a little more boat and a little less portable; thus the Airis Sport 11 above, full scale inflatable kayak - weighs as much as a fiberglass one, but fits in it's own custom backpack that fits the back seat of the Mini :-) On the camera side, I'm still averaging a little under a hundred pictures a day (mostly weekend bursts but starting my weekdays dragonfly-hunting in the front yard helps too) and I've abused the SP-550UZ enough to need to get it repaired twice now; it's due for a third, Canon's photokina announcements disappointed me, so I'm now using the SP-570UZ. A little bulkier, so it has MORE BUTTONS which turned out to make things like manual focus easier to get to - but the 20x lens really provided enough additional "reach" (in terms of, for example, picking up a turtle in this picture that I didn't notice in person) that I'm happy with the extra size, even if it is always on me.) I've also settled into a comfortable shooting and captioning workflow with the EEEpc with kphotoalbum for captioning and tagging, and a handful of python scripts to sort and upload. Yay cheap hard drives :-) I've also gotten more adventurous about going places with picture taking specifically in mind; aside from the regular trips to local wildlife hotspots, this year I've been to Chicago , Los Alamos , the VLA , and Camden, Maine . (So also "yay cheap 16G SDHC cards"... everything else is getting more compact and portable/nomad-friendly - but not bandwidth...) Of course, I haven't gotten any better at writing more often :-) Current Location: all over the place! Current Mood: geeky Current Music: Wicked Soundtrack Tags: computers, photography, scenery, toys (Leave a comment)
July 7th, 2007
01:12 am [Link]	European Vacation I'm back and just about over the jetlag... and since I'm now a year behind on Iceland stories, I figure I should at least get some of the Spain stories down now... Instead of going to EuroPython this year (it's next week, in Vilnius) I arranged my habitual two weeks in Sweden to overlap with Jesse and Kaia's "elopement". That's a fascinating story told elsewhere and a few hundred pictures over on flickr. Barcelona seems to be a nice and well-behaved city; even the less pleasant parts merely reminded me of Brooklyn :-) Since I don't actually like cities to start with, Laura found a British couple who do casual bird-watching tours of the Ebro Delta. I've only posted about a dozen of the nearly seven hundred pictures I took that day (mmm, eyestrain... and when I was back in the hotel with a cold facerag over my eyes, I still saw flapping wings in various configurations :-) The delta has a fascinating collision of ecosystems - on the one hand, you have the Mediterranean and the brackish mixture of that with the mouth of Ebro river; on the other hand, you have vast rice paddies irrigated with fresh water drawn by canal from far upstream on the Ebro. In between, lagoons and marshes, and a range of nature preserves easily reachable over the course of the day. Sightings included night heron, coot, flamingo, swallow (nesting in one of the bird-viewing blinds :-) tern nests, bittern, purple heron, avocet (and chicks), various ducks and ducklings, egret, mundane and exotic gulls, and some fish. Plenty of long-lens work, as well as occasional closeups (the night heron seemed pretty fearless, as well as entirely uncamouflaged.) Also of minor note, I didn't bring a laptop to Spain, just a somewhat-obsolete Archos PMA430 "image tank" with wifi. This served pretty well, running OpenPMA but that wasn't much of a challenge - all that actually needed was USB Host support and rsync, I didn't do any captioning until I was back in Sweden (and much of it I deferred until the flight back to the US.) Current Location: home at last Tags: photography, spain, sweden, toys, travel, wedding (Leave a comment)
May 20th, 2007
02:55 am [Link]	Birds and Snakes and Airplanes... New toy - Olympus SP-550UZ. 18x zoom. I'm now a lot closer to "if I can see it I can shoot it" while still having a camera that I can have on me most of the time... only two downsides: xD cards are evil and I've been enjoying it so much that I've been spending time with the camera that I probably should be spending on other things... I tried to read the first few chapters of RESTful Web Services, enjoyed the introduction, got a few pages in to chapter one - and then went for a 3 mile hike in the rain, and found it to be a better choice, simply due to finding this and this in the middle of nowhere. This is more than just new-toy-glow, I'm averaging 80 pictures a day and far more of them make it to flickr than before. It was definitely worth not waiting for the Canon S5-IS (the announcement of which was why I was open to looking at a larger camera.) I've even changed some of my summer plans to be more photo-oriented (not entirely because of this, but it was a real influence.) Great Meadows NWR turns out to be a pretty good place to watch planes going into Hanscom (BED) while also observing nature; the Piaggio "pusher" above is probably more unusual and distinctive than most of the critters I saw that day :-) Current Mood: enthusiastic Current Music: R.E.M. Tags: photography, picture, toys (3 comments \| Leave a comment)

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